Leaves on the Tree
by IronAmerica
Summary: Yondu is six years old when people come from the stars. (Part one of Fade Away.)
1. Leaves on the Tree

So, it's a new series.

Un-beta'ed.

List of triggers for this story: Child abuse, murder, torture, kidnapping, slavery, general abuse

- o - o -

Leaves on the Tree

Yondu is six years old when the people come from the stars.

At first, everyone is fascinated by them. The men from the stars bring things that are beyond words to describe. Yondu remembers his father trading a few pelts for off-world fruit. Everyone liked the sticky sweetness of the fuzzy red fruit, and Yondu begged Papa for another one, red eyes wide and earnest as only a child could manage. Papa tapped him between the eyes and told him he could have another on his name day. (Yondu wishes, when he's half-asleep and absolutely sure of his privacy years later, that he hadn't whined so much that day.)

Then things start to change. Papa comes home from the star-walkers market with an eye that's swollen shut and one of his ears is gone. He says not to worry, but Yondu sneaks down from his hammock in the branches of the family grove to listen to his parents talk. He's just barely past being a pouchling, but he understands the note of worry in Aba and Papa's voices. Aba wants to run to the south, where the Ukola clan lives under the waves. The Ukola are her people and hiding in the ocean with the sea monsters is better than… Yondu doesn't get to hear the rest because Papa's head swivels around and he fixes a scared, angry glare on his son. Yondu is returned to bed with a stern warning to stay there or he'll get nothing for his name day.

They don't run to the Ukola clan.

The star-walkers come the day after Yondu tried to listen to Papa and Aba talking about adult things. Yondu screeches in fear and grabs his little brother -he's a pouchling, Papa should be looking after him but Papa is missing and everyone is screaming and Yondu has to protect his brother - and runs as fast as his legs will carry him into the swamp. He can hide in the swamp. Even Papa can't find him when he's hiding really good. Yondu knows he can stay there until he can figure out how Aba got to the Ukola caverns under the sea, and then he can run there with Mordu…

His tree - his favorite tree, the one with the big hollow in the center that you can only get to if you climb down from the crown - isn't safe. One of the star-walkers peers down to where Yondu is hiding, clutching his brother to his chest and gestures for them to come up. Yondu hugs Mordu tight enough to make him start crying and shakes his head, eyes wide in fear. The star-walker says something in a strange language and holds his hands down the hollow. A fuzzy red fruit drops into Yondu's lap and the star-walker says something else.  
>Yondu bites into the fruit and chews it until it's softened up before pressing the chewed-up pieces into Mordu's mouth. His pouchling brother stops crying and begins sucking on the soft fruit, rubbing at his eyes with a tiny fist. Yondu looks up and catches a look of disgust on the star-walker's face. (The look vanishes pretty quick.) The star-walker is holding more fruit in his hand and is gesturing for Yondu to come up.<p>

Coming up proves to be the biggest mistake of Yondu's life, not that he knows it at the time.

Aba and Papa are kneeling in the center of the village when the star-walker brings Yondu and Mordu back to the Udonta grove. Yondu falls to his knees and barely manages to keep Mordu in his arms. The star-walker smacks the back of his head with a stick when he tries to get up, and Yondu scurries over to Aba and Papa on his knees, tears pricking at his eyes.  
>They're put in a tent with five other Udontas, most of them younglings like Yondu. Papa takes Mordu and puts him back in the pouch where he's supposed to be and rubs the back of Yondu's head, humming a lullaby to make him and the other younglings calm down. Aba sings along, softly, because the star-walkers hit her when she spoke to Yondu and the other younglings earlier in their own language. Yondu falls asleep with his head in Aba's lap and two of his cousins curled against his legs.<p>

The last time he ever sees Aba, she's being dragged into a big red tent next to the stump that used to be the family tree. She screams and never stops. Papa is dragged away next. The star-walkers rip Mordu out of Papa's pouch and Yondu receives a beating for trying to rescue his little brother that leaves him with a swollen eye and a broken arm. Papa is hung from the central tree in the grove and Yondu screams until he blacks out. Yondu never sees what happens to his baby brother.

Yondu and his cousins are taken to the star-walker's market, where they've never been before. If Papa and his uncles had been taking them, they'd have chattered like the tree-climbers that seem to have vanished like everyone else in the forest. Instead of it feeling like a treat, Yondu feels a sense of dread in the pit of his stomach and clutches at Ool's hand. The situation is dire enough that she doesn't even shake his grip off or chide him for behaving like a pouchling.

When they arrive in the market, Yondu's feet are cut and bleeding and the only reason he isn't whining about being tired is because the star-walkers have been hitting him and his cousins every time they say something in their native tongue. (Yondu repeats a few words he's heard from them back at them and gets a laugh. And then one of them smacks him hard enough to rattle his teeth and says something in a tone that Papa uses…used…when he was telling him and the other younglings not to do something again.)

Ool and the other girls are separated from the group and dragged away. Yondu does scream then, trying to run after her. She's Aba's favorite and he knows that Aba taught Ool her songs and that's a piece of Aba and he doesn't want to lose that… And the star-walkers kick him to the ground and that's Yondu's first introduction to a whip.

He spends the rest of the day in a tent packed with thirty other boys - an Ukola up from the south for the holy days, five temple boys, fifteen Kwi-lus from the west, and nine of Yondu's cousins from a grove five days walk to the east of the swamp - snuffling and muffling his sobs in his knees. The temple boys have spent the most time as captives of the star-walkers and can even speak of bit of their strange, garbled, un-musical language. One of them - Katiru - says the star-walkers are discussing the price each of them will fetch. Like they're animals. Yondu and the Ukola - one of his Aba's people, but not from Aba's clan - huddle together and whisper to each other in their own language, even though Katiru tells them that the star-walkers have a magic box that lets them spy on people from far away.

Yondu and the Ukola - Jisulo, he says his name is - wriggle out under the back wall of the tent one night and run for the edge of the market. Jisulo gives out a screech of pain and falls to the ground, twitching. Yondu freezes for one second too long, trying to help his yearmate get off the ground. The star-walkers catch up with them and then Yondu learns that the star-walkers can hold storms in sticks and that's what they hit Jisulo with. It's a painful lesson that he'll never forget.

Katiru hums a temple song for them when the star-walkers put them back in the tent, and doesn't even say "I told you so" as Yondu and Jisulo cry into his shoulders.

Jisulo is taken away in the morning. He never comes back.

Yondu misses the Ukola. Him and his cousins are from the same clan, but he's always been too shy to talk to them when it was a clansmeet and everyone was there. Plus, he's only been out of the pouchling stage for less than a name cycle and they're all so much older than him. He might as well still be a pouchling. He spends a lot of time crying, and even Katiru gets tired of him and won't hum temple songs anymore.

One day, its just Yondu in the tent. One of the nicer star-walkers gave him toys a few days ago, when Yondu had stopped crying for a stretch. Yondu misses his toys from home, except he's seen smoke from the direction of the grove and knows it's the grove being burned to the ground with all of his toys and his family's history and… He buries his face in his knees and sobs, hands clenching tighter around the cold toys he's been given. No one takes them away or tells him to stop being such a stupid pouchling.

A big star-walker with a furry face - Yondu thinks it looks like he's glued a pelt to his chin - comes up to the tent two months after Yondu was taken from the Udonta grove. Yondu is crouched on the ground, shoving the little metal boxes around on the hard dirt to make them crash into each other. He tilts Yondu's head up and uses the pad of his thumb to wipe away tear tracks from the child's face. Yondu closes his eyes and pretends that Papa is the one wiping his tears away, except then he remembers watching Papa twitch and jerk around on the end of the rope slung over a branch on the center tree in the grove and it prompts a fresh round of sobbing and half-sounded cries for his Papa in his home tongue.

The furry-faced star-walker doesn't smack him for making the aborted chirps of distress and rubs his back instead. Yondu's chirps of distress increase in volume until he's wailing into the star-walker's shoulder and clutching at the man's strange garments for comfort. Just like Papa would have, the star-walker rubs his back and just below the base of his crest, and Yondu eventually falls asleep in the star-walker's arms, toys dropping to the ground.

- o - o -

So, what did you think? Good? Bad? Want to cuddle bitty!Yondu? Drop a line and let me know.

Also, I should add that this story - and every one of it in the series - has a list of triggers that is potentially longer than the story itself. There's nothing incredibly graphic, but I do advise caution when reading any of these.


	2. Reach Up to the Sky

So, I lied. There's a second chapter to this, and *then* the next story.

Un-beta'ed.

Trigger warnings: Child abuse, non-graphic assault of a minor, torture, general abuse

- o - o -

Reach Up to the Sky

The six year old wakes up in a star-walker home. The bed he's in is more comfortable than sleeping on dirt for two months, but it's not as comfy as his hammock in the crown of the Udonta grove. Yondu rolls onto his belly and presses his face into the fluffy cloud the star-walkers have put on the bed, snuffling like he's about to cry again.

Eventually, a slim star-walker enters the room. Yondu doesn't know if this one is male or female or one of the temple people, so he decides to call this one a girl. Maybe. The star-walker is a funny color, like too-ripe korshi fruit that's been in the sun all day. He says as much, and flinches when he realizes he's been speaking his own language. Katiru said that got you hit if the star-walkers heard you. He lowers his arms after a second when the korshi fruit-skinned star-walker doesn't smack him or yell. She's staring at him with a mixture of annoyance – Ool and Aba wore that look a lot when he was a pouchling – and sadness – like Katiru, after Jisulo was taken by the star-walkers.

She holds out her hand and Yondu slides out of the bed, padding across the floor to her. Instead of letting him hold her hand, the star-walker grabs his shoulder in a painful grip and practically drags him out of the room and down a confusing series of hallways. Yondu stumbles and struggles to keep up, gasping in pain every time he trips and the star-walker drags him until he can get his feet again. (He tries not to remember how Aba and Papa would pick him up and carry him if they had to move quickly. Aba's screaming again and Papa is twitching on the end of a rope and Yondu has to bite his hand not to scream.)

Yondu ends up in a small pond of warm water. He shrieks and tries to claw his way out, because this water is warm enough for sea monsters and don't these _shaskolr_ know _anything_? (Papa _and_ Aba would smack him and make him drink swamp water for calling the star-walkers _shaskolr_, and then they're screaming and twitching and Yondu slides under the warm water to hide his tears again.)

The koshi fruit-colored woman pulls him up from under the water and begins rubbing handfuls of smelly oil into his shoulders. It bubbles up into white foam and Yondu giggles when he blows on it and makes some of the bubbles float away and pop in the air. The woman doesn't smack him or tell him to stop, so Yondu keeps playing with the bubbles. By the end of whatever bizarre star-walker ritual this is – maybe it's how they bring orphaned children into their clan? It's definitely not the style of bathing anyone sensible would use – Yondu's blown bubbles in every direction, including onto the floor. The woman hauls him out of the water and does something that makes it vanish down a small hole in the bottom of the pond. Yondu watches with wide eyes as the water drains out of the pond and doesn't resist as a rough white blanket is wrapped around his bare shoulders.

The next room he's taken to has a table laden with more food that Yondu's seen in two months. The woman – she must be his new Aba, and he tries not to start snuffling like a distressed pouchling over the thought – puts him on a tall chair (why are star-walker tables so high off the ground?) and puts a flat white dish in front of him. Yondu grabs the first thing he recognizes from the other dishes on the table, ignoring the manners that his real Aba taught him about letting elders eat first because he's _hungry_ and he recognizes the…red…fruit…

Yondu ends up hunched over on the floor, puking up the gruel he'd had the day before and he keeps puking until it's just thin bile. If he hadn't whined for more, Papa and Aba and Ool and Jisulo and Katiru and the Kwi-lus and his cousins and Mordu and everyone else would be alive. He's such a stupid pouchling.

The star-walker woman eventually coaxes him back into the seat he'd vacated and wraps the rough blanket around his waist before filling the white dish with food. The bowl with the red fruit is gone, but Yondu doesn't mind. He shouldn't have whined for more… The six year old eats solemnly until he's full and pushes the plate away. He's tired again and wants to sleep…but then the woman is back and Yondu bites his lip so he doesn't whine that he wants to be carried.

If he whined about wanting more of the star-walker fruits and the star-walkers destroyed his clan, what will happen if he whines and begs to be carried?

The fuzzy-faced star-walker is in the room Yondu is dragged to. Yondu shuffles closer to the korshi fruit-colored woman and grasps her skirts with one hand, since his other is occupied with keeping the blanket wrapped around his waist like a hunter's kilt. The fuzzy-faced star-walker says something and the korshi fruit-colored woman leaves, bowing as she closes the door.

Yondu's blanket is taken away and he stands in front of the doors, shivering as the fuzzy-faced star-walker crouches down in front of him, eyes hungry. He stares at the ground and clenches his hands into fists at his side, shaking like the crown of the sleeping tree back in the grove. The star-walker starts touching him and Yondu squeezes his eyes shut, trying to keep distress chirps in his chest and not in his mouth. One of Aba's relatives touched him like this, and that's when Yondu learned how to say _shaskolr_ and Aba killed her cousin and fed him to the swamp.

Yondu screams and lets out a high-pitched string of distress chirps when the star-walker touches his hip.

The star-walkers are all _shaskolr_, and this one is like Aba's dead cousin and it's worse because Aba and Papa aren't there to stop him and he wants to go home and he promises Anthos that he'll be a good boy and he won't whine like a pouchling anymore if Papa comes and rescues him like when Aba's cousin was trying to touch him and Aba will come get him and Aba and Papa are screaming and on the rope on the central tree and they're…not…

_Help me_.

Yondu crawls into a corner and sobs out a prayer to Anthos, promising that he'll be so good and he'll never whine again if he can just die and join Aba and Papa and Mordu and Jisulo and Katiru and Ool and the Kwi-lu boys in the afterlife.

- o - o -

So, what did you think? Good? Bad? Ready to set anyone who isn't a Centaurian on fire? Drop a line and let me know.


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